Andrew Bird's Global Village Fete

That old truism about comedians writing shows on the back of a cigarette packets en route to Edinburgh reflects the Fringe’s unpolished charm, but with last year’s sell-out Village Fete, Andrew Bird proved himself adept and it's a shame he didn't take a similar planned approach this time around.

A cigarette packet would, quite frankly, be good stationary wasted on this show’s half-arsed premise – something vaguely to do with how globalisation is killing Britain’s diversity of local character. It’s a tenuous excuse for nostalgia based around growing up in the Northamptonshire sticks – it's a mischievously chapping doors for kicks, number-of-gears-on-your-bike as status symbol, kind of thing.

Bird explains that a planned tour of British villages was aborted when he began making enquiries with nonplussed parishioners – “humour’s not really our thing,” responded one bloke brilliantly. It’s the kind of natural comedy you can’t make up, and yet, like a lot of good material, it’s dashed off with undue haste. Patient build-ups and pregnant pauses for effect aren’t Bird’s style – a shame, since silence would have been funnier than his groansomely lazy gag expressing admiration for Chinese people not being fat when they eat Chinese all the time.

Possibly flushed with last year’s success, Bird might have anticipated skipping on to arenas by now – his matey, comedy-for-all shtick fits the arena mould, and with more constructive writing he can feasibly fill them in time. Until then – best get smoking.